I miss those old BBS forum like GBAtemp

[Scorchy]

Hey, I've recently relogged to my gbatemp account which I didn't use since 2018 and realized how much I missed that kind of early internet forums. I noticed this especially after playing a game called The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna dlc where there was a forum like that depicted in the game and it's so nice. Just to see how those forum worked, the message were always by ascending order unlike reddit where the posts with the most upvotes come to the top. People would know each other and meet on forums around themes they liked and they would know each other, you'd get to know people and remember names. Everyone had a unique username that defined them; there'd be people posting "First" when a big thread released, etc.

Anyway, I kinda miss those days. Even gbatemp now has evolved too much, it doesn't feel like that kind of forum anymore.

 

[aoimatsuri]

At least the "I can haz new pokeman game" is still around haha.

I agree tho.
GameFAQS is relatively unchangedtho.

 

[Scorchy]

At least the "I can haz new pokeman game" is still around haha.

I agree tho.
GameFAQS is relatively unchangedtho.

See, just the fact it took this thread 30 minutes to get a reply was amazing. Plus it's an well formatted one with punctuation. On reddit you'll get a reply in 2 minutes (if your post doesn't get auto-deleted by the auto-moderator) but it'll be just a sentence and not a well-thought or organized idea. Most people will just downvote/upvote your post and won't reply

The fact it takes longer to post here and that there is no mobile app for instant notification makes the content higher quality.

I never liked gamefaqs though, idk why but the forum design and content was never my cup of tea.

 

[Ryccardo]

it doesn't feel like that kind of forum anymore.

For me it has to do with the merging of the subforums
And/or just the DS/Wii popularity having dipped?

GameFAQS is relatively unchangedtho.

SBAllen (who's never been Ceejus) has very recently quit too
And apparently in the whole 2010s I've been gone from it (not like I've returned) they:

• added real quotes to forums
• added non-plaintext FAQs
• removed direct links to them (the dw.com.com ones)
• stopped being related to CNet and sold out to, wait for it, "fandom" (Wikia)
• I bet long before it started being yet another https only crap site, and that it would still suck without adblock

 

[SylverReZ]

vBulletin had an excellent look for all BBS boards, particularly phpBB when I was looking at ahem.... boards for piracy. Nowadays, everything has corporate generic styles and hate them with a passion.

 

[linuxares]

The fact it takes longer to post here and that there is no mobile app for instant notification makes the content higher quality.

You know, old BBSes didn't have mobile apps

 

[Scorchy]

vBulletin had an excellent look for all BBS boards, particularly phpBB when I was looking at ahem.... boards for piracy. Nowadays, everything has corporate generic styles and hate them with a passion.

Exactly, you could go as far as say every website look the same nowadays, there's not effort about giving them a unique flair. It's all minimalist UI and plain colors. Just compare how unique the iOS 6 icons were to what they look like now, sure minimalism looks great but it sucks that everything became like that, nothing is unique anymore.

 

[The Catboy]

Damn, those were the days. I still remember waiting for the release of B9S while talking to my friend on Discord. Good times

 

[hippy dave]

Imagine being old and nerdy enough to have a favourite forum software.

Mine was phpBB.

 

[Chary]

Forums are the only place where it feels like there's a sense of community online, anymore. It feels like what you say will get responded to; you're not making a quippy remark for people to mindlessly hit upvote/like on, and then be forgotten. There's discussion, there's personality, there's charm. Forums are great.

 

[DragonMals]

This place will be one of the best fourms that I've ever touched. The fact that another one that I thought was going to be good decided upon themselves to nerf the messaging system because their vision for the fourms is more centric on the game it's based on and you have to "bring your off topic stuff elseware" now by force sucks.

Meanwhile we have a whole fucking Edge of the Fourm in coupled with Fourm games inside of it and a whole IRC chat on the bottom.

 

[aoimatsuri]

See, just the fact it took this thread 30 minutes to get a reply was amazing. Plus it's an well formatted one with punctuation. On reddit you'll get a reply in 2 minutes (if your post doesn't get auto-deleted by the auto-moderator) but it'll be just a sentence and not a well-thought or organized idea. Most people will just downvote/upvote your post and won't reply

The fact it takes longer to post here and that there is no mobile app for instant notification makes the content higher quality.

I never liked gamefaqs though, idk why but the forum design and content was never my cup of tea.

Yeyh.
Reddit.

Imagine being old and nerdy enough to have a favourite forum software.

Mine was phpBB.

Ah php my love.

I only knmow xenoforo tho

 

[Maximumbeans]

See, just the fact it took this thread 30 minutes to get a reply was amazing. Plus it's an well formatted one with punctuation. On reddit you'll get a reply in 2 minutes (if your post doesn't get auto-deleted by the auto-moderator) but it'll be just a sentence and not a well-thought or organized idea. Most people will just downvote/upvote your post and won't reply

The fact it takes longer to post here and that there is no mobile app for instant notification makes the content higher quality.

I never liked gamefaqs though, idk why but the forum design and content was never my cup of tea.

I quit Reddit years ago and I'm glad I did. It's a weird place and the culture of the users (at least at the time before they did the 'New Reddit' overhaul) was generally dogshit. People were sarcastic and mean for no reason, everything revolved around upvotes, and almost everybody had this smug intellectual persona that was paper thin.

 

[Robert Newbie]

Hey, I've recently relogged to my gbatemp account which I didn't use since 2018 and realized how much I missed that kind of early internet forums. I noticed this especially after playing a game called The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna dlc where there was a forum like that depicted in the game and it's so nice. Just to see how those forum worked, the message were always by ascending order unlike reddit where the posts with the most upvotes come to the top. People would know each other and meet on forums around themes they liked and they would know each other, you'd get to know people and remember names. Everyone had a unique username that defined them; there'd be people posting "First" when a big thread released, etc.

Anyway, I kinda miss those days. Even gbatemp now has evolved too much, it doesn't feel like that kind of forum anymore.

Forums are the only place where it feels like there's a sense of community online, anymore. It feels like what you say will get responded to; you're not making a quippy remark for people to mindlessly hit upvote/like on, and then be forgotten. There's discussion, there's personality, there's charm. Forums are great.

Good memories. No online community may be perfect, but I appreciate that GBAtemp has enough users here that your questions will usually get a response. Over two decades is a good amount of time to build a userbase.

GBAtemp has a good mentality overall. I'd rather have five meaningful posts than a hundred one-word responses across the forum, and thankfully most other users here seem to feel the same. You get more humanity here than a standard social media conversation, in my opinion.

Those "First!" posts were as entertaining as they were a pain. Now, they just make me nostalgic for the early 2010's.

 

[Ligeia]

I couldn't agree more. Forums are so infinitely better than any of those "social" media thingies out there that encourage baby tantrums, onomatopoeias outbursts and narcissistic showoff over elaborate posts.

 

[Dust2dust]

That brings me back a long time ago (in this same galaxy, though). I was using a very slow 300 baud modem to log to some local BBS in this city (Montreal). The speed the words were displaying was about half of what you see in a typical news ticker at the bottom of your TV when watching the news. But fun times, still. GBAtemp has a similar feel to those old BBS, that's probably why I stuck to it. I gave up on Facebook a few years ago, even though my family members were there. And I never subscribed to any other social networks.

 

[jacobkoller]

I actually hated it. People acted like your opinions value was based off of how many posts you made, or what rank you were, as if it had any bearing at all on your knowledge in whatever topic at hand. Inevitably you had the 10 or so people who turned it into their entire life and posted 24/7 on everything and acted like they were leaders of the community. More often than not they were insufferable twats, pardon my french.

 

[Robert Newbie]

I actually hated it. People acted like your opinions value was based off of how many posts you made, or what rank you were, as if it had any bearing at all on your knowledge in whatever topic at hand. Inevitably you had the 10 or so people who turned it into their entire life and posted 24/7 on everything and acted like they were leaders of the community. More often than not they were insufferable twats, pardon my french.

This. My favorite is when people post a one word reply for that boost. If you contribute in the community and you make meaningful posts, the other members will recognize you.

In the old days, everyone looked at the post count. The Internet was smaller, so it had more weight. With so many communities, it doesn't really seem to matter now.

 

[BlueFox gui]

i'll say i fucking hate how these online communities moved to discord, i complained about this before and i've seen other people saying the same, it makes more difficult to find things since discord stuff doesn't show up on google search results, i used to find a lot of stuff like tools or answers to questions i had by simply googling and finding forum posts and comments, nowdays everything is hidden behind a discord server that you will not join only to see if someone answered your google question about how to unlock luigi in sonic 3 and knuckles, sometime ago i wanted to see mario kart DS modding stuff, i couldn't find anything new, only old tools and old tutorials, but everything was broken, until i found ONE youtube video with a discord link, and in this server there was a bunch of modern tools, tutorials and other stuff that i couldn't find ANYWHERE outside of that specific server, people really want their work to be public, stop using discord

 

[linuxares]

i'll say i fucking hate how these online communities moved to discord, i complained about this before and i've seen other people saying the same, it makes more difficult to find things since discord stuff doesn't show up on google search results, i used to find a lot of stuff like tools or answers to questions i had by simply googling and finding forum posts and comments, nowdays everything is hidden behind a discord server that you will not join only to see if someone answered your google question about how to unlock luigi in sonic 3 and knuckles, sometime ago i wanted to see mario kart DS modding stuff, i couldn't find anything new, only old tools and old tutorials, but everything was broken, until i found ONE youtube video with a discord link, and in this server there was a bunch of modern tools, tutorials and other stuff that i couldn't find ANYWHERE outside of that specific server, people really want their work to be public, stop using discord

This is why I I'm strongly against discords. Everything gate kept behind a door hand lock. With all company that can kill or at anytime. All info lost forever...